Keeping a BDI on your Assets.

Maximo
Asset Configuration Manager (ACM) is designed to manage the
configuration management requirements of complex assets operating in
the aerospace, defence and rail sectors where safety and regulatory
compliance is of primary importance.

One
of the central components of Maximo ACM is the Build
Data Interpreter (BDI). At
it's most basic level the BDI analyses configuration managed Assets
position by position to ensure that they comply with the
configuration rules established in the corresponding model.

That
said the BDI is a pretty complex process and tasked with processing
large amounts of Assets with complex rules and configurations
performance can degrade.

The
Maximo ACM 7.5 release introduced a number of enhancements to address
performance with particular emphasis on the BDI. One
of the primary improvements, to achieve greater scalability, was to
allow the BDI to run multiple instances in parallel.

This
is achieved by setting up multiple instances of the BDI Cron Task
within the Cron Task Setup application.

The
Continuous mode of the BDI cron task checks compliance
whenever you perform an update that could potentially affect the
status of an configuration-managed asset.

The
End Item mode of the BDI cron task ensures that the BDI checks
the compliance of every end item asset at least once a day.

As
can be seen in the image below multiple instances of both types of
BDI Cron Tasks can be configured and there is additional logic to
ensure they do not clash or perform unnecessary processing.

Also several new Cron Task Parameters have been introduced to
allow increased control over the work the BDI Cron Tasks perform:

SiteID:
Allows a Cron Task to be configured to run for a specific Maximo
site.

ProcessMode:
Allows the user to decide whether the BDI should validate the Asset
against all possible configurations or just its current one.

ProcessMaintenancePlan:
Controls whether any related maintenance plans for the Asset are
analysed and acted upon.

These
multiple instances can be spread across dedicated servers to ensure
timely processing of transactions which can affect the status of a
configuration managed Asset.In
addition to these scalability improvements additional configuration
options have been introduced in the Models (CM) application. This
allows the user finer control over the work the BDI performs.

1. Configurable
Map Code Processing.

At the Model level
individual status codes that the BDI validates can be be made
inactive to prevent unnecessary
checking depending on client business requirements.

2. Configurable
Node Level Processing.

Within the Build
Hierarchy and Position Rules it is now possible to disable BDI
validation for individual nodes (and
their children) within the build hierarchy:

In addition to the
performance and scalability improvements described there is also increased visibility of
the work the BDI undertakes via the BDI Queue Status (CM) application. This application gives a
list of Assets the BDI is processing, has processed or is currently waiting to process.

I hope this gives you a flavour of some of the improvements we've incorporated as part of our Maximo 7.5 release. In short there's never been a better time to use ACM to manage your complex Assets!